Brahms Berg Bartok

A CD to classify under B, the Shirakawa Hall recording.

For a concert, intially planned to be recorded live by COSMO VILLAGE in Shirakawa Hall, Nagoya, on an Imperial Bosendorfer (the one with an extra bass octave) as part of a four concert Viennese series in 1996, my Japanese manager needed me to come up with a program featuring a Viennese composer apart from Haydn, Mozart and Schubert, already featured by the three other pianists in the series (two of whom were major drawcards). The Berg Sonata op 1 seemed perfect and I constructed a program of Brahms (Sonata no 3, op 5), Berg and Bartok (Outdoors Suite), pitching the argument that record shops could classify the CD under B. It worked! Scriabin was one of the encores planned for the concert to also have a B, so I left him in to be consistent with my thinking, Just as the Japanese tour was leading up to Nagoya, news came that the concert was sold out. Shirakawa Hall had marketed their Viennese mini series as a four-recital package, Since COSMO VILLAGE needed to block the two front rows for their equipment, we recorded in a single day in Shirakawa Hall, on July 7, 1996. on the eve of my concert.